Kill Bill

I watched both parts of "Kill Bill", within a few days of each other, and enjoyed the second part a good deal more than the first. The first part seemed to be little more than a series of connected fight scenes (admittedly entertainingly executed), while the second allowed the characters a little more time to show personalities. A movie called "Kill Bill" could have been anticlimactic, since the title certainly suggests a specific end, but I truly wasn't sure exactly how this was going to play out until it got there.

Quentin Tarantino is a bit of a mystery to me. He's managed to turn what I would consider weaknesses (a taste for especially cheesy 70's films and music, a particularly crude vocabulary, and a tendency to write all of his characters with exactly the same voice) and turn them into a distinctive style of his own. I suppose what this tells us is that it's better to be yourself, even if it's not an especially impressive self, than it is to be like everybody else.

I enjoy his wisecracking dialogue (the actors always seem to be enjoying it, too), and the man knows how to bring a certain tension to a scene. He also knows how to spring a surprise, even if he relies on surprise as a technique a little too much. He never seems to censor himself and decide there's something he won't do, so you always have the sense that anything can happen.

I was going to say that he could shore up some of those weaknesses and make even better movies, but after thinking about it, he might actually lose some of what makes his movies work if he did.